Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

Using CRM to manage leads is using the wrong tool for the job. Companies using CRM to manage leads are finding out more and more what this misstep is costing them. Put simply, what it is costing them is a chance to introduce themselves.  CRM is a great tool, but it’s important for the small business owner or sales manager to remember what it is, and what it is for.  CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and what it is does best is Manage Customer Relationships. While this is obvious and widely known it’s worth repeating.  It’s worth explicitly stating the mission of CRM because it is so easy and so common for companies to get swept up in all of the possibilities that CRM promises. Before too long, getting deeper into the demos of a CRM, it’s tempting to conclude that a CRM “can do anything.”

But remember that CRM is about Managing Customer Relationships. A prospect is a different entity than a customer and should be treated as such. Successfully dealing with a customer involves executing a certain set of behaviors and actions. Are those actions and behaviors exactly the same for dealing successfully with prospects? They are not. CRM does not have the suite of tools that are designed around being the first on the phone with a prospect. In today’s hyper-competitive environment, with more and more companies leveraging technology, being first to contact; and contacting consistently are critical ingredients for managing your leads successfully. Lead Management Software, not CRM, is the solution that offers these tools.

To be successful, it’s necessary to use the right tool for the job. You can hammer a nail with the back end of a screwdriver but the results will be sub-otpimal. If you are managing leads with a CRM your hammering nails with screwdrivers.

Part of satisfying your customers is making the right connection.  If you are a sales manager or small business owner, there’s a question you always have to answer when you distribute leads. Which of your sales reps should you connect with which of your leads? It can be done randomly. And in many cases it probably always has been done randomly. Until the people in charge of distributing leads had access to the kind of technology that is now available, lead distribution couldn’t be much better than random. Round Robin lead distribution has been the norm.

As sales managers and small business owners have been embracing technology such as lead management software, it’s possible for them to distribute leads not only more quickly but more intelligently.  Using a lead management solution it is possible to distribute leads from instantaneously to a group of sales reps based on configurable rules. Makes sure sales reps only receive leads that they are licensed to handle. Make sure sales reps receive leads who are inquiring about products or services that match their expertise.

Using lead management software with configurable distribution rules, it is possible to create different rules and strategies about how and to whom you want to distribute leads. It starts with making sure your biggest opportunities go to your best sales reps but you can continue making rules that ensure that leads are routed to the individual sales rep is most likely to be able to close them. Creating distribution strategies and reporting on their effectiveness is easy with lead management software.

When it is determined that a certain sales rep closes leads at a higher rate when the leads have a certain characteristic, it’s good practice to route more leads with that characteristic to that sales rep. This skills based routing whitepaper shows the results of companies who have embraced skills based routing as a way of strategically distributing leads to their sales reps.

What is the best way to serve consumers who have all the information in the world at their fingertips? The internet has changed consumers forever. Before the internet, in the prehistory of customer empowerment, consumers lived in darkness. The information that consumers got about products came mostly from advertisements; top down pronouncements of a products comparative superiority from the company itself. It was hard to get anything more than anecdotal evidence from other consumers about how good a product really was. The internet changed all that. Consumers are smarter than ever, and want to know exactly what they can expect before they lay down dollar one. Moreover they expect to have exactly the experience that other consumers have had. When a consumer sees some product has a four star rating, and they have a one star experience, they will fully expect to have this made right. And it’s the foolish company who fails to make it right; making every effort to turn a customer’s one star experience into a four star experience.

Then along came the Smartphone, which put the internet into the pockets and purses of consumers as they move through the world, making purchases large and small. When the internet was only at home, consumers were still vulnerable to shopping in relative darkness. Now, it’s possible to get volumes of information about products and services at any time and any place.

The dawn of the age of customer empowerment has resulted in an expectation of truly superior customer service. If a business can’t provide it, the consumer will go elsewhere.  The internet has rounded up an unprecedented number of competitors in a single place where they are within striking distance of each other. To stand out, a business simply must provide the best service. Providing the best service can mean many things, but in the case of a business model where the consumers submits an online inquiry through a webform, providing the best customer service starts with being the first on the phone with the prospect. It probably does not matter how nice you are prepared to be, or how well you know your product if you are trying to make an impression in a voicemail. Providing the best service starts with providing the fastest service.

For a sale rep, providing the best possible service is more than knowing your product and having a good attitude. One often overlooked fact to keep in mind is that the lead life cycle begins before the lead is assigned to a sales rep.

From the point of view of the sales rep, there is nothing that can be done to serve a prospect before the rep takes responsibility for the lead, so the steps that can be taken before this point are often ignored. They may not be on the mind of the sales rep, but should be on the mind of the successful sales manager or small business owner.

Before a sales rep even gets a lead on the phone there are things that should have been taken care of. Using the right tools, it is possible to ensure that prospects are contacted by the sales rep who is the best match for them. To make meaningful connections, prospect should be contacted by sales reps who have expertise specifically in the product they are interested in and with whom they are most likely to be compatible.

Using the right lead management system it is possible to route leads based on sales rep skills. If you discover that a particular sales rep can connect with certain types of leads better than others, you can route more of those leads to that rep.

It is also important that leads be distributed to available reps instantly. As soon as the prospect submits an online inquiry the lead can be posted to a lead management system and assigned to a sales rep based on intelligent lead distribution rules. In order for intelligent lead distribution rules to be truly intelligent, they must be configurable. A configurable lead distribution engine allows you to always be finding new ways to get the right lead to the right rep.

When the right leads are routed to the right reps, there are more satisfied customers.

Here’s an interesting article about how email hurts employee productivity.

As a general rule, this is a hard lesson to learn. One reason that it is hard for people to get their heads around the fact that email is inefficient is because compared it to the methods of communication that came before it, it is enormously efficient. It costs next to nothing. It’s everywhere. It’s close enough to instantaneous that most people regard it as being just that.

Of course there are faster ways, but for normal communication, Email will do just fine. And that experience of having email handle normal communication just fine is another reason it’s hard to get people to understand that it is hurting their productivity. It’s not easy to convince people that, “Hey, that thing that works fine dozens or hundreds of times every day isn’t actually working fine.”

But the reason why email leads to lost productivity is because people use it as something other than a way to handle normal communication.

Have you every peaked under the hood of how other people organize their workflow? Many a proud email user will gush about how they have developed a system of organizing their work using their email inbox. They do things like using their inbox as a to do list by flagging messages that need follow up. They store documents that have been sent to them in their inbox. They keep all of their email in their inbox forever; never archiving or filing.

The cited article talks about how email is inefficient, but in reality, Email is a fine way to handle normal communication. Email starts killing your productivity when it is used for document storage, as a to do list, basically anything other than a tool for normal communication.

Benefiting from email is easy. Use it for communication. When an email contains a task, extract the task and put it in your system for managing your tasks; a list on a piece of paper, task tracking software, whatever you use. If the email contains a document, save it to a central location where everyone who needs to be able to access it can do so. Multiple versions of documents bouncing between multiple inboxes doesn’t serve anyone. Save it on a shared drive and send around the document path.

And then be done with that email. File it. Archive it. Put it somewhere where it won’t sit along side of or be confused with something that needs your attention. The email was a piece of inbound communication. It has served it’s purpose. Extract it’s information and get it out of the way. Otherwise you’ll be re-reading it someday. Guaranteed.

In our business, Lead Management, we noticed long ago how much slower it is to manage leads using email. Email seems fast, but compared to a solution that passes lead data in real time xml posts it’s sluggish. Email seems pretty organized, but compared to a solution that automates follow up, it’s like pinning note cards to a corkboard.

Keeping your inbox at the center of your work universe, with all your work revolving around it may be comfortable, but the cost of that comfort is productivity.

Quickly getting in touch with a prospect who has submitted an online inquiry is one of the key ingredients in a customer-centric service strategy. This is true simply because people’s attention is constantly shifting. What is important now, is less important in an hour.

If a sales rep at the other end of an online inquiry receives it some hours or even days later, they are going to see that inquiry as a fresh bit of news. In reality, the prospects priorities have shifted in the time that has passed since they requested information or a quote.

It’s tempting for a sales rep to think of the prospects interest in their product as a permanent or at least durable fixture in the prospects overall landscape of interests and desires. It is true that their interest in the product is real. It’s real enough for them to ask for information about it. But it’s important not to confuse a realness of interest with a permanence of interest.

There’s an old saying that you never step in the same river twice. This is true of reaching out to prospects as well. The person who, yesterday, thought long enough and deeply enough about what you sell to ask for more information is the same person who, today, has spent the day with their family at the beach. Call this prospect within one minute of when they submit an inquiry and you will be speaking to the same person who wants to hear about what you are selling. Call them tomorrow and you’ll reach them in the middle of family time. You are an interruption. Or more likely, you are a guy leaving a chipper voicemail.

While you are interrupting them, you are asking them to reconnect with desires and interests that they articulated at some time in the past. The further back in the past, the more likely that the desires will be difficult to connect with. The more difficult they are to connect with, the more of an interruption you are. And of course, the more of an interruption you are, the worse the experience of your customer.

So be quick. Don’t be an interruption.

Since the dawn of the Internet, consumers have been experiencing ever greater degrees of empowerment. Nowadays there are are a whole host of tools that allow consumers to share ever more information about products and services.

As the technologies behind the Web and the people who use them get more sophisticated, the tools of customer empowerment are becoming more and more powerful.

The Web is the first place of its kind where visitors could publish discussions about products and services. They could share their experiences with anyone in the world who was interested. This is so commonplace now, that we forget what it was like before. In the old days, companies would issue top down declarations of their products superiority. Word of mouth spread some, but only pretty locally. If Paul had a bad experience with a company, Paul told two friends. And they told two friends. But it pretty much petered out after that. Now, anyone who is curious and knows how to use a search engine will read about Paul’s bad experience. And it will give them pause.

This massive exchange of information between customers resulted in a realistic expectation of what one could expect if they gave their business to one company over another. No longer were consumers left to decide based on the company’s own proclamations. It’s now possible to find out what a person like you, using this product might reasonably expect.

And it doesn’t stop at consumers offering opinions about products and services. They are also suggesting alternatives. The Web has enabled people to 1) find what they’re looking for, 2) discover that there’s a better alternative, and then 3) find and buy the better alternative.

This first generation of consumer empowerment tools were game-changing to say the least.  But the tools that people are using to become more empowered consumers are at whole new level, giving even more control to the consumer.

Google has just launched Google Advisor. Along with sites like Zillow, Google Advisor is turning the financial marketplace into a virtual bazaar where vendors undercut each other to give consumers the best possible deal. Think of sites like this as Ebay in reverse. Instead of a seller displaying what he has to sell and sitting back while competing consumers drive up the price; a buyer announces what he is looking to buy and competing vendors drive down the price.

It didn’t take long for consumers to get the taste for the first set of consumer empowerment tools that cropped on the Internet; search, forums, review sites, blogs, etc…   (Who would consider making a major purchase without researching it on the Internet?) As soon as it became the preferred way for consumers to shop, companies had no choice but to respond by offering better service and when possible, better products. Looking forward, this new way of shopping pioneered by Google Advisor and similar sites will be the kind of consumer empowerment tool that, once consumers get a taste for how it works, will tip the balance further towards consumer empowerment and a better customer experience.

Sales reps need tools to do their jobs. They need the basics, a phone and a desk. A computer. And they need leads. The lucky ones have lead management software. Lead management software (LMS) is actually a suite of tools that are designed to help sales reps contact leads quickly and help sales managers and marketers optimize their lead spend to get maximum ROI. LMS has tools that help reps contact leads quickly; tools like automatic lead distribution and an integrated lead dialer. LMS has tools that help sales reps keep in touch with leads and nurture them until they close; tools like lead nurturing email campaigns, and lead prioritization that filter leads to the top of the list when they are due for another contact attempt.

A lot of these tools, if not every one of them is fully configurable to enable sales managers and sales reps to create a truly intelligent workflow that is unmatched in its efficiency and repeatability. LMS is a high efficiency set of tools that enable everyone to work smarter. The results for companies using lead management are often dramatic. Recent research on the importance of speed to contact has shown that leads contacted within one minute of an online inquiry are %391 more likely to close than those contacted after one minute.  LMS gives sales reps the tools to make contact in under a minute.

LMS is a smart tool. How smart? LMS even has a feature that hunts through all the ripest and best leads and connects the rep to the lead. This feature is so smart because no matter what kind of sales rep you are, your brain fatigues. When fatigue sets in, using smart tools to work smart might seem like a lot of work.  It is during these times that you need a button; a big button in the center of your software that says “Get Lead.” Click it and get a lead. Don’t worry about finding the best opportunity, LMS found it for you.  Just click the button, and get the prospect on the phone.

So in the morning, when you’re bursting with energy and ready to take on the world you can get into your leads more strategically. Play your hunches. Comb through your list of leads, and find your opportunities. But after lunch, when it’s harder to work smarter, you’ve got a button. A big blue button that you can push to talk to a lead.

How do we keep in touch? And what exactly is meant by ‘keep in touch’? Sales Reps need to keep in touch with their prospects. Clearly, when you fall out of contact with a prospect you effectively lose any chance of closing them. The fact that you do keep in touch is important. But it also matters how you are keeping in touch. It’s important to be consistent without being overwhelming. It’s important to interact in a way that gives useful information. It’s important to make contact quickly and if your sales cycle is not a quick close, to hover within reach. To stay on the mind of the prospect.

How is this done? Probably mostly with Emails and Phone calls.

Emails sent to leads should be sent according to a strategic pattern that can be monitored and improved. A few factors to be considered when contacting prospects by email are:

1. The speed at which the first email is sent to a prospect making an inquiry
2. The content of the email, both in terms of how useful it is and how well it is formatted
3. The interval at which emails are sent

As far as contacting leads by phone, there are very similar considerations

1. It’s important to be the first person on the phone with a lead
2. The content of the calls
3. The interval at which the calls are made

Lead management lets you implement an out-of-the box comprehensive communication strategy. Are all your leads being followed up on? Lead management software is designed to address all of the above email and phone contact considerations.

When a lead submits an inquiry either through your website or a lead provider; a lead management solution helps to ensure that:

1. A professionally formatted email will be sent to the prospect immediately
2. Emails are sent according to proven best practices to keep your company in the front of the prospects mind
3. One of your reps will be the first on the phone with the prospect, within a minute of the online inquiry
4. Recordings of calls help ensure that sales calls are being executed in accordance with company policy
5. Sales reps are prompted to call leads when they become due for another call. (In accordance with proven best practices)

Lead Management does many things well, but fundamentally it’s about keeping in touch with leads until they close. Fundamentally lead management is an out-of-the box comprehensive communication strategy.